Healthcare facilities rely on patient monitoring to supplement interventions and reduce the instances of patient falls. Constant eyes-on monitoring of patients can be difficult for healthcare professionals to maintain. Video monitoring can be used to automate patient monitoring and increase the ability of a healthcare professional to effectively monitor a group of patients distributed between different rooms. Various systems and methods for patient video monitoring have been disclosed, such as U.S. Patent Application No. 2009/0278934 entitled System and Method for Predicting Patient Falls, U.S. Patent Application No. 2010/0134609 entitled System and Method for Documenting Patient Procedures; U.S. Patent Application No. 2012/0026308 entitled System and Method for Using a Video Monitoring System to Prevent and Manage Decubitus Ulcers in Patients, and U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 61/707,227 entitled System and Method for Monitoring a Fall State of a Patient and Minimizing False Alarms.
Various routines can be run to analyze the output of a camera and identify events. An alert can be issued to summon a healthcare professional to intervene when events are detected. Such an automated system may be susceptible to light noise and other factors that can cause false alarms, which can burden a staff of healthcare professionals with unnecessary interventions. Video monitoring can rely on lighting of various kinds to allow visualization of the patient area and identify particular situations of interest. However, unpredictable changes in lighting of the patient's room can cause erroneous detections of situations warranting intervention and thereby causing false alarms. There exists a need for systems and methods for accounting for unpredictable changes in lighting to reduce the incidence of erroneous detections and false alarms.